Abstract
In The Bounds of Cognition, Fred Adams and Kenneth Aizawa treat the arguments for extended cognition to withering criticism. I summarize their main arguments and focus special attention on their distinction between the extended cognitive system hypothesis and the extended cognition hypothesis, as well as on their demand for a mark of the mental.
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Notes
Richard Menary (2007: 195, fn. 2), too, has doubted the need for a mark of the cognitive.
I’m not terribly comfortable with this distinction between “largely conceptual” and empirical theories. But there are theories that seem more empirical – they depend on evidence for their support, can be tested against observations, and so on – than others. My hunch is that theories of content fall on the less-empirical end of what might be a spectrum rather than a division.
For Menary (2007: 15), cognition is the completion of a cognitive task by the manipulation of representations. Of course, this definition would seem to require some further account of which tasks count as cognitive. This aside, clearly this definition of cognition might be more friendly to the possibility of extended cognition than Adams and Aizawa’s.
References
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Thanks to Ken Aizawa for comments on an earlier draft of this review.
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Shapiro, L.A. A review of Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa, The Bounds of Cognition . Phenom Cogn Sci 8, 267–273 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-009-9120-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-009-9120-z